More reflections on Lawrence of Arabia

Huntsville Forester

The attached “Letter to the Editor” is in response to Macfie’s column that appeared in last week’s North Star.
Re: Planting IEDs in the 1917 Desert War
The civil war in Syria gives cause to reflect on Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, and on his brief encounter with another soldier of fortune, Gilbert Lawrence Button, a man who ended his days in Parry Sound.
T. E. Lawrence, born in 1888, was a British army liaison officer who led Arab tribesmen in conducting guerilla warfare against the Ottoman Turks, allied with Germany in the First World War.
Gilbert Button, also English-born and five years younger than Lawrence, grew up on a South African sheep farm.
He learned to shoot firing off discarded rifle ammunition left over from the Boer War, and at age 12 killed a lion raiding his father’s stock. When the wool market collapsed, the Button family returned to England, where, at age 17 Gilbert joined the Sussex Yeomanry.
In 1915, the unit was sent to Gallipoli, where Empire forces were battling the Turks.
“The Dardanelles” campaign, a disaster for the British, was largely conducted at close range from holes in the ground. (When a tunnelling Turk plunged through the roof of a tunnel Gilbert was digging; Gilbert beat him to the draw, otherwise I couldn’t have interviewed him in Parry Sound over 60 years later). The British withdrew, and when the Yeomanry again engaged the enemy it was far to the south, in Palestine.
There followed months of fighting in the desert, often conducted at the point of a bayonet and short of food and water. Then, while on outpost duty shortly after Jerusalem fell to the British, Gilbert was summoned to headquarters.
“You got your posting to the Royal Flying Corps,” he was told to his immense relief.
Posted to the School of Military Aeronautics near Cairo, he learned to fly on DeHavilland DH 6’s (“just like an old kite”).
Then he flew a Nieuport Scout “up to the line” and joined an operational squadron of about 20 machines based at Haifa. In 1979, I took my tape recorder (but apparently no camera, for I can’t find a photograph of him) to Gilbert’s home in Parry Sound expecting to hear tales of duelling with Fokkers, and was not disappointed.
But today I’ll deal with a special operation involving an uneasy few hours spent in the presence of the legendary Lawrence of Arabia.
Lawrence was a pioneer in the field of improvised explosive devices, the IEDs of the Afghanistan war. Gilbert Button’s brush with him occurred while Lawrence was busy wrecking trains along a railway linking Damascus and Aleppo, Syrian cities much in the news today.
One day, Gilbert was tasked to fly eastward, “scared all the way,” to deliver two cases of dynamite to Lawrence at his desert hideout.
“He used to get all these Arab tribesmen together, but they weren’t very friendly with each other,” Gilbert explained. And they seemed to be more interested in plunder than in ridding their lands of Turks.
“When they got this booty they used to fight over it. They’d just wrecked a train, and these Arabs were wild-eyed and slashing.
Now I was scared to death.” On top of that, an unexpectedly cool reception from Lawrence only heightened the air of menace.
What the guerilla leader wanted most of all was a “plunger,” a hand-operated dynamo producing an electric spark by which explosives could be set off remotely, just as a locomotive reached it. And, to Lawrence’s great disappointment, Gilbert hadn’t brought one.
“But anyway, I slept in his tent ‘til the morning. He didn’t say much to me, not very much. He seemed to be sitting and rocking all night. When I took off in the morning I was glad to get out of there, I’ll tell you.”
T. E. Lawrence remained an enigmatic and reclusive figure until his death, in a motorcycle accident, at age 47. Post war he published an autobiography, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” and served for years as a low-ranking member of the Royal Air Force, during which he played a major role in developing a high-speed air/sea rescue launch, a godsend to downed aircrew in the next big war.
Gilbert Button emigrated to Canada, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in a non-flying capacity in the Second World War, then set himself up as a hunting and fishing lodge operator on remotely-situated Three-legged Lake, near Parry Sound.
I met “Gil” through my work with the Fish & Wildlife Branch of the Ministry of Natural Resources, and quickly added him to my list of local folk whose life stories warranted documenting.
Today, Gilbert might be labeled an accessory to terrorism.
But the view from the cockpit of an airborne stringbag packed with dynamite surely was simply that of a terrified youngster in uniform doing what he was told.
John Macfie
Parry Sound